


Pro-Tip: Don't Panic

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Post-Retcon, Quadrant Confusion, Tentabulges, Xeno, nerds doing romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 19:59:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5640073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or, <i>Karkat Vantas’s Foolproof Advice for Tolerating, Befriending, and Otherwise Romancing Smug, Moody Aliens Who Never Shut Their Face Gash</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Pro-Tip: Don't Panic

**Author's Note:**

> This began as a desire to fill-in some of the missing convos that no doubt took place on the meteor--cultural differences, queer issues, hemospectrum politics--and it, uh, grew.

 

**Tip 1: Approach with Caution**

 

The first time he tells you about his wriggler days, you touch his face. Just a soft brush of nubtips, not even really a pap. Dave recoils like you slapped him.

“Dude, what the fuck.”

“It’s a gesture of sympathy, bulgemunch.”

Dave is straining against fight or flight, quickened breaths, tense muscles. He even drifts a couple inches off the floor.

Maybe paps aren’t pacifying gestures to humans?

“I didn’t ask for your sympathy,” Dave says.

Irritation hits your gastric sack like a swallow of extra-spicy grubsauce. These fucking stupid aliens and their refusal to understand anything remotely normal.

“Oh, really now? You tell me about your psychotic lusus-bro and his brigade of stuffed-animal stalkers, and how he almost threw you off the roof of your hivestem one time for _fun_ —.” Just thinking about it makes you angrier and sends a wave of impotent longing through you for your own lusus, the memory of being cared for and held. “Lusii are supposed to protect, they—.”

Dave snorts and flips his cape in a bombastic, tooly move that he is totally going to deny later. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have said anything if I knew this was the Troll Lifetime Channel. Next time I’ll just keep it to my fucking self.”

The newest district of Can Town is erected in huffy silence. The two of you only talk when absolutely necessary, and even then only to the Mayor. Still, you somehow end up working on Town Hall back to back. Dave is warm through your sweater.

 

**Tip 2: Bond Over Shared Interests and/or Traumatic, Emotionally-Stunting Experiences**

 

You are sitting up late in the nutritionblock—you’ve finally made it to the first love scene in your book and like hell you are going to put it down now. Dave stumbles in, dressed in red boxers and a white t-shirt with his sign printed on the chest, hair ruffled up like a featherbeast crest, shades crooked.

“I didn’t think there’d be anyone up,” he mumbles, lumbering across the room like an undead to hit a button on the coffeemaker. The machine lets out a menacing gurgle and starts to fill a cup. It smells a little like coffee, but also like a burning engine.

You expect Dave to retreat now that he’s got his drink, but he doesn’t. He sits down across the table from you and okay, yeah, this is a common area. He can sit wherever the fuck he wants to and drink his coffee and you can sit where you want to and read a fucking book.

He doesn’t drink the coffee. He just sits. And stares. He seems haunted, somehow. Used up, like his skin is damp, wispy fog that could dissolve at the tiniest breath of movement. The silence is stretched so thin it’s tearing.

You ask, “You want me to read out loud?”

 Dave says, “What.”

“It’s a simple question, douchewagon.” You ruffle the pages, dust cover scudding against the tabletop. “You want me to read out loud?”

Dave shrugs. Fuck it. He can leave if he wants. You flip back to the beginning, because there is a lot of necessary stage-setting in the first chapters, important information on the characters and their motivations. Besides, you are not about to read a concupiscent love scene aloud to Dave while he’s sitting here looking so goddamned pitiable.

He probably isn’t getting any of the actual story, but the sound of your voice seems to ground him, the tension unwinding until he is sitting in the chair rather than hunching. By chapter two he has picked up his coffee, and by the time you begin chapter three, he has recovered enough to start making up nicknames for the love interests and insulting the writing style.

“No offense, dude,” he says. “But this book is kind of a steaming shitpile.”

You glare at him over the top of the page. “Thanks for the nuanced critique. Go fuck yourself.” It’s late. You don’t have a decent rant in you. Also you kind of agree with him. _Callously Caliginous_ is not a great representation of the genre. “Why are you even up?”                 

Dave puffs his cheeks out in a nut-creature pout. “Wittle Davey had a bad dweam.”

He tells you about the nightmare.

Surrounded by black featherbeasts that hop and peck and open their orange beaks, and when they scream they scream in human voices. They peck at Dave’s face and hands before one of them, the biggest, with a crown of bones and weeds and shining things, snatches his shades off. She laughs at him as her threshcutioners tear at his face, until one of them emerges with his eyes to present to their Empress.

Dave says ruefully, “Used to wake up screaming like a little girl. Till I learned to keep that shit on lockdown.” He is pushing the mug around the tabletop, a ceaseless shift from hand to hand.

“Didn’t your lus—your Bro hear you?”

“He’d just turn the music up. Or say there must be a cat dying out on the fire escape, if he had people over.” He laughs with a brittleness that squeezes your bloodpusher into unfamiliar shapes. “He wasn’t the sort of dude you climbed into bed with when you couldn't sleep.”

“Well, I could have crawled into bed with my lusus,” you say. “If I wanted a serrated pincer up my waste chute in the middle of the night.

The icy chuckle turns into a guffaw. “Whatever you’re into, dude. I’m not about the judgment.”

You are both smiling now, sitting here gazing at each other like pan-rotted wrigglers. Typical for the life of Karkat Vantas that the first person to pale-flirt with you in a sweep is an arrogant, flap-dangling human who doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Telling you about his shitty human lusus and making you feel all squishy and conciliatory. You want to walk around the table and pull his head against your chest and bury your face in that pale, fluffy hair. It’s so stupid-looking, and fuck, probably so soft. You want to rub circles in the place his horns should be.

It’s just instincts. Whatever. You’re a higher fucking life form so you can curb the impulse and instead tell him about the two days you spent listening to your neighbor die. One of the undead had broken into her hive and taken its time finishing her off. You can still remember her screams. You tell him about the crawlspace that your lusus dug beneath your recreation block when you were a wriggler. Whenever a culling drone would drift close, you would lie cradled in the dirt, cold earth hiding the mutant heat of your body. Dave is a much better audience for this than he was for the book. 

When the two of you finally do drift off to your opposite ends of the meteor, you feel wrung out, flat and jittery with catharsis, your skin cold. Your dreams pulse with rivers of blood and huge, ugly crows.

 

**Tip 3: Always Carefully Consider Helpful Advice Before You Discard It**

 

At first you refuse to subject your aural canals to Dave’s shitty music, but after rereading every book in your sylladex five times, watching all your movies, and wandering every dreary science fiction inch of the meteor, ancient slam poetry starts to sound okay.

Dave has alchemized equipment, human electronics with impervious shells and sleek, unnatural colors, nothing organic about them at all. He sets up in the common room so as to annoy as many people as possible. He works with headphones on, furrowing his forehead and sucking on his lips. He tips his head like the music is already out there somewhere and all he has to do to find it is listen hard enough. You watch the shadows lap at his jaw and collarbones, the quick jolts of his fingers on the turntables and little sliding dials that you don’t know the words for. You catch yourself watching his hands all the time lately—stacking empty cans of green tubular beanpods to build a police precinct, fussing through his own hair, twining around a coffee cup in the middle of the night. They can turn back time, close loops, create endless other selves to wander the bleakness of the dream bubbles. You have no idea what a god of blood would do—that ship has sailed, crashed, and sent hundreds of sailors screaming to their deaths—but you doubt it could be as powerful as a god of time.  

Someone bounces down beside you and the couch springs vibrate, nearly jolting your book out of your hands.  

“Fuck off,” you grunt reflexively.  

Vriska grins through a curtain of curling steam, claws wrapped around a mug. She and Kanaya have both picked up Rose’s human quirk of sucking down scalding hot leaf juice all day long. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“Oh, really? Is it something that sounds like a perceptively deep insight into my psyche, but is in fact just inane, dribbling bullshit with no basis in actual reality? Because that’s just the usual shit that slides from your facegash.” You huddle down more comfortably against the cushioned back of the couch and hunch your shoulders. “I’m busy.”

“Oh please, you’re pretending to read a book.”

“ _Pretending_ to read a book _?_ You are unbelievable. Here I am, minding my own business, sitting quietly—.”

Vriska snorts.

“— _Quietly_ with my novel, not bothering anyone, but no, I must be _pretending_ to read the fucking book. Are you really so bored that you need to come over here and start making stuff up?”              

“Hm…” Vriska sips smugly at her leaf water. “To me it seems like unless your book is printed across Dave’s forehead, you haven’t been doing much reading at all.”

Dave clucks in annoyance and presses his headphones to his ears, and holy slurry-guzzling Horrorterrors, you hope he hasn't overheard any of this.      

“Might as well go for it.” Vriska is still talking. Why. Why this. “It’s not like the two of you have many other concupiscent options, what with human taboos and both of you shoving your strut-pods down your shout-tunnels with Terezi. And I’m pretty sure the Mayor doesn’t even have mating urges—.”

“Oh my god.”

“—And I would rather lay my body down in a pit of fire marchbugs than let either of you touch it, so I say ogle away!”

 

**Tip 4: Always Keep Your Quadrants in Order**

 

Your friends-jams with Dave get more and more frequent. Most of them take place in your respiteblock rather than his, since you flatly refuse to have any sort of serious conversations on a concupiscent platform, even if humans insist on sleeping on them like highbloods in some satiny harem romance. You take to leaving your door open, not because you are hoping he will wander in, okay, you just like a little air circulation on your horntips. Today he comes in so silently that you are pretty sure he’s hovering, which is totally unfair.

He faceplants into your pile, onto one of Rose’s more atrocious sweater attempts (pink and green with a pattern of misshapen meowbeasts), elbow hitting a cracked DVD jewel case. He gets a face full of moldy couch cushion.

“Doof.”              

“Yes, Dave. Come and climb onto my pile with me. Invade my personal space and get your nasty human oral fluid all over my cushions.”      

Dave maneuvers himself onto his back. “Dude, what? You guys need a better word for saliva.”

“Oh, right. So we should just adopt all your needlessly extravagant vocabulary and run around like pompous sea-dwellers with our fists up our nooks?”              

Dave hooks an eyebrow over his shades. Your face burns and you drop your attention back to your husktop screen.                 

It’s been a couple of days since you’ve hung out. Dave’s mood has been wavering—one second he is moping around the lab, muttering lyrics to himself, and the next he is teaching you and the Mayor wriggler games, which you refuse to believe involve chalk renderings of a human bulge, no matter how fucked up Earth civilization was.

Dave rolls onto his back, his shirt riding up at the hem. You don’t mean to check him out, but come on. Self control only goes so far.

“Yo.”

Shit, has he caught you looking? But no, he makes a thoughtful noise and goes on, “You ever think about dying?”

_What?_

He has one arm curled lazily over his head. It would be a hilariously _come hither_ pose if he had been doing it in any other circumstance. The lenses of his shades are pointed straight at you, but you can never tell where he is looking. It drives you shithive maggots.

“Uh, yeah?” you say. “No shit. We’re on a meteor traveling roughly the speed of light, en route to an alternate reality while being pursued by an omniscient woofbeast with a sword. And about 80% of the people we’re stuck here with are violent psychopaths with zero impulse control. Of course I think about dying.”

Dave wriggles his butt a little, settling himself more firmly into the pile. You hear the distant bray of a buried honk-horn. You thought you’d gotten rid of all those things. “Nah, I mean, did you ever think about just getting it over with. Back when you lived on Shitditch Lane in Assfuck Nowhere. When it was just you and crabdad and a whole planet full simpering idiots who all literally hated your guts.”

You push your husktop aside and sit up. “Not for one fucking minute. I was prepared to live as long as possible out of spite.”

Dave’s lips twitch. “Whoa no way, Karkat Vantas doing something out of spite? Call up the newspapers. Alert Troll CNN.”               

“Fuck you very much. Anyway, suicide isn’t really a thing on Alternia. If you want to kill yourself, it’s probably because you’re broken or fucked up in some way, right? Which means one of the drones will probably get to you first.”

This is so _weird._ Lying on your pile with a human, Dave fucking Strider of all people, who you had expected to shack up with Terezi the first chance he got. Who’s been watching movies with you and listening to you read aloud, playing dumb games and generally acting like your moirail. But if he really _was_ your moirail, the endless foot of space between you would not exist, the field of afghans and comic book pages and broken tupperware. Your skin wouldn’t be thrumming with the longing to be touched, gastric sack squirming with a multicolored palette of emotions, some of which are not very pale at all.

“Wait,” you say. “Hold the phone-crab. Did you think about suicide?”

“Are you kidding? Getting Daves killed is, like, my number one form of recreation.” Dave talks with his hands, god pajamas bunching at knobbly wrists. You want to bite at the pale, tender skin. “And before the game I didn’t really think about it like, yo, cool party idea: let’s kill ourselves. I’m gonna need Colonel Mustard, a lead pipe, and a conservatory.” His voice is as light as honkbeast down, meaningless reference tossed out as carelessly as anything else he sprays from his mouth, but you can feel the hand squeezing down on your pump-biscuit again. 

“But sometimes I’d just think, like…what if I stopped?”         

You worm a little closer. “Stopped what?”               

“Normal shit. Like, eating? No problem. Had to get most of my food by myself anyway. Sleeping I guess I couldn’t really control, but—.” His voice cracks like a dry bone. “Or maybe just when we were strifing, what if I just didn’t block? He’s never pulled a punch in his life.”             

“You think he would just have killed you?” That sick feeling is coming back. That isn’t what Lusii do.

Dave shrugs against the pile. “Don’t know. But part of me kind of wanted to find out, even though I always told myself I was just being an angsty little bitch. Of course I would starve if I stopped feeding myself. My bro was a busy dude, he doesn’t have time to deal with shitty little brothers without basic survival instincts. I mean, if you step in front of a bus you’re gonna get—.” His voice thickens and trembles, like ripples in sopor. “Gonna get hit, shit—.” He scrubs at his nose. You keep it dark in your block, and turned away from the light his shades look like two black holes opening in his face. “Wow, uh, I swear this isn’t why I came in here. I wasn’t all ‘shit, let’s be emotional all over Karkat today’—.” 

“You’re such a fucking idiot,” you say, and pap him squarely on the cheek.

Dave doesn’t recoil like last time, but a steady shudder moves through him. You’re careful to keep your claws curled away, and do it again.       

“This is a troll thing, right?” He swallows, ball of his throat trembling, skin so thin, so delicate. “A pale thing? 

“Right for once in your pathetic human life.”

“Right. Okay.” Dave’s hair is pushed into a fluffy bump on the top of his head and his shades are knocked crooked. You can feel his warmth transmitted through the pile. You want to touch him so badly. “Okay, so, uh, for humans this is an awkward thing. Like, two bros hanging out on a pile of random household objects and stroking each other’s faces and gazing into each other’s eyes—.”

“I can’t see your eyes.”              

“Still hells of gay, dude.”

“So clearly we have to stop immediately. Jegus fucking forbid that something gay happens.” You stroke your thumb across his cheek and he shivers, actually fucking trembles at your touch. He wraps a hand around your wrist, but he doesn’t try to pull you away.               

You reach up with your other hand and take off his shades.            

He reacts like you’ve just pantsed him in a courtroom full of legislacerators. “Dude what the fuck!” He bares his flat teeth, the pinpoint speckles that dust his cheeks standing out against his blotchy flush. His lashes are so pale they almost glow, eyes craters of outraged shock. Provided your mutant freakshow of a body matures the way it is supposed to, they are the same color yours will be in a couple sweeps. Red. _Red._  

Dave lunges. You move on instinct, snarling, pinning him easily. You’re stronger than he is, your muscles are denser, you could slice him into tiny glistening pieces. He might be a flying, time-traveling douchetier, but physically he’s no match. Abruptly he seems to realize this, sinking back into pile with a hard puff of breath. “You’re fucking nuts.” His eyes are gorgeous. 

You have to be asleep. That’s the only possible answer. There’s no way this can be your Dave (when did you start thinking of him as _yours_?), no way he would just let you toss his shades aside and stare at him. His eyes can’t be lava red, meteor red, _your_ red. He can’t possibly have spent years hiding them behind shades the way you have hidden the sludge in your veins with grey words and floppy sweaters. That’s too goddamn poetic for real life. That's a casteplay romance. Humans don’t even _have_ red eyes.               

“Dude, if you wanted the full monty you should have told me. I haven’t even gathered a dowry, I don’t have a single fucking sheep—.”             

“ _Shut up_ , Strider.” 

You clench a handful of white hair and he makes a tiny noise as you lick into the soft heat of his mouth. You stroke your claws against his cheek. “Come on,” you growl. You are not even sure what you’re asking for. 

“Whoa.” Dave puts a hand against your chest and for second you think he is going to push you away, but he’s just holding steady, feeling you. You’re purring. Fuck, you’ve only been touching him for less than a minute and you are already purring with pleasure.             

“Okay, you do NOT get to mock me for a purely physical reaction, I’d like to see you try to—"              

“Chill.” He moves his fingertips over your thorax like he is searching for the source of the rumble. “It’s cool. I mean, uh, kind of neat.” He winces, probably because he just used the word ‘neat’ unironically. Then he smiles, and without his shades he can’t pass it off as smug. His eyes shine like the bloody rivers of your Land and the fiery ones in his. If this was a romance novel it would be called “Eyes on Fire” or something equally stupid. God. You are so nauseating. 

You drag your clawtips across his cheek again and he hisses, draws back like he is afraid you are going to gouge into him, like you think this is pitch. When you’d met him, definitely—you couldn’t have imagined feeling anything but nookchafing, bilespitting irritation for him—but right now with him underneath you, body warm against yours and _not pushing you away_ , you feel so flushed that you can’t imagine how you could ever flip on him.

 

**Tip 5: Always Talk Out Your Issues Like Responsible Fucking Adults**

 

You don’t have trouble imagining it for very long.               

Barely a day after you spend the better part of an hour making out on a pile, you run into him by the transportalizer to the lab. He is standing with his back bowed, fingers twisting in his cape. You aren’t trying to be stealthy—after what had happened on this meteor no one wants to be snuck up on.               

“Hey, are you—.”

Dave goes after you when you are still a couple feet away, closing the distance in that freaky-fast flash you are still half-convinced has to be time shenanigans; you’ve never seen anyone move that fast, not even Nepeta. Your shoulders hit the flimsy metal wall and his hand hits your throat. You choke beneath your shock and his wiry, desperate strength. Black-scarlet flashes across your vision and a growl vibrates in your thorax. You have to quell the instinct to slice him open across his unprotected belly. Random disemboweling probably isn’t heroic or just enough to kill a god tier, but it would still be a shitty thing to do to a potential matesprit.

He lets go after a second.               

You don’t quell the enraged shout of, “Jegus FUCK, Strider!”

The portcullis of his shades is pulled back down over his eyes, and he shrinks away from you like he had that first time you’d touched him. He shoves his hands in his pockets, going for casual way too late. “I’m not in the mood, bro.”               

“Not in the mood for what?” You hadn’t even said anything. “I’m not in the fucking mood to get thrown into walls!”

“For this, for whatever the fuck this is—.” He gestures between the two of you with splayed fingers. “I just…I can’t deal with it right now, okay?”

“Oh.” Your face burns and your bloodpusher feels like it’s trying to drill into your gastric sack. “We don’t have to anything concupiscent, if you don’t…we could just talk?”               

Wow. Fuck you, mouth.               

Dave sneers. “How about you find someone else to share your delicate troll feels with. Maybe the Mayor, or like, a wall.”

He stomps away and you are left with ringing in your ears and battery acid pumping through your veins. What the fuck had gone wrong since yesterday? He’d been into it, grinding up against your thigh and whimpering into your mouth, sucking on your tongue like he was desperate for you.               

_Think about it, bulgelick. Maybe it’s because you can’t keep him in one fucking quadrant._  

You shudder. Then you step on the transportalizer and you’re suddenly shuddering down to your atoms. Your nerves get too scrambled to feel any pain, but you’re shaking and tightness pulses behind your eyes—most likely you are all growing tumors every time you use the damn thing. 

The lab is in its familiar tableau—coffee machine smoking slightly, headphones and books and markers strewn across the table in a colorful deluge, Rose and Kanaya seated at one end of the table, knee to knee, like they’ll spontaneously combust if they let two feet get between them. Rose takes one look at you and says, “It isn’t you.”               

She knows. She always fucking knows.                 

Your skin prickles all the way to the tips of your claws. “What?”               

She flips idly through whatever Tome of Darkist Magyckks she’s got open on the table. “Whatever inevitable outburst happened in the hall. It isn’t you. Well, it is you” she amends, a touch smugly. “But it’s not your fault.” 

You walk right past her and get very interested in the coffee machine. You tap a claw against the button that looks like a cup with a tuft of hair coming out of it, and the hissing and shifting of the mysterious machinery within drowns out Rose’s and Kanaya’s murmured exchange. They only use a couple words; if Kanaya hadn’t been a jade-blood and Rose a nothing-blood you would have said they were communicating telepathically. You feel a dark swirl of something as putrid and acidic as the coffee pissing into your mug. God dammit, you do _not_ want to sit giggling in a corner with Dave and finish his fucking sentences like the most obnoxious kind of matesprits. Even though you kind of already do that. 

You set your coffee down hard next to Lalonde’s book. “What do you mean?”

Fuck you sideways with a rusty culling fork you’re actually doing this. 

“What do you mean, it’s me but it’s not my fault? 

Rose closes her book with a decided little flick of the fingers, oozing satisfaction. “He’s currently in the throes of a textbook queer-crisis,” she says. “What we have in front of us are Dave Strider’s attempts to come to grips with his building attraction to grey-skinned alien boys with, I quote, “cute little fucking horns.”             

You flush all the way down to your thoratic struts. “He called my horns cute?”

“I’m honestly impressed,” Rose says, dripping with superiority. “I didn’t think he’d manage to claw his way out of the closet for at least another few years.” She fixes you with that stare that makes you feel like your thoughts are stamped on the outside of your pan in block letters. “You’ve been really good for him.” 

Dave avoids you for awhile. Or you avoid him. You’re civil to each other—pass the grubsauce at dinner and talk about the lack of weather and work on Can Town, which is slowly expanding to suburbs and farmsteads and fairgrounds, but that intimacy, that human emotion called friendship that had made you warm all the way from your strut-pods to your hornbeds is gone. You killed it and pailed its corpse. No surprise he doesn’t want to talk to you—he had come in to lie in your pile all pale and vulnerable, and in response you’d macked on him like the slimiest, most plague-ridden nooklicker to wriggle out of the brooding caverns. No wonder he’d attacked you by the transportalizer.

 

**Tip 6: Don’t Solve Your Problems With Violence**

 

His entrance is less dramatic and you have a book this time instead of your husktop, but the setting his otherwise familiar. You pretend you don’t notice him, but you are reading the same line over and over. Instead of faceplanting onto your pile, he stands next to a busted toaster and fidgets.

You raise an eyebrow. “Should I just bare my throat and get it over with, or are you not going to fight like a sneaky asshole this time?”

Dave fusses with his cape. “Yeah, uh, sorry about the—.” He makes a violent motion with his arms that looks nothing like choking. More like he’s cracking an egg. “I was being a shit.”              

You snort. “Permanent state.”             

He licks his lips a couple times. “So…you want to spar.” He might have been about to say something else. You’re a little distracted by the sight of his weird mammal tongue dragging across his weird mammal lips.   

You toss your book aside and grab your sickles out of your sylladex. “Sure.”  


Sparring with Dave is usually infuriating. He’s faster and his reach is longer, and he is categorically incapable of doing anything without running his mouth. Even if you are stronger, he always wins, and he does it with a goddamn swagger. Like he’s only trying halfway and you are wasting his time.

Today, he doesn’t talk. He focuses, his mouth crumpled into a thin pink line, breaths of exertion pressed up into gasps. You know what he’s doing—this isn’t sparring for fun or for practice. This is a sedative, this is pushing himself to exhaustion. Back in your Hive you would que up music and then practice for hours, until your muscles felt like twisted slabs of melting rock and you could drag yourself to your cocoon and make sure you did not wake for another ten hours. 

Dave winces every time his sword hits your sickle. His hands are shaking.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” you snap after almost ten minutes of thick, humid silence. Dave’s shoulders shake and his thorax expands and contracts in greedy gulps. Sweat rolls down his cheeks and drips off his chin. Is he sick?

In the next exchange you catch his sword with the curve of your sickle and twist, a fancy disarm that never works; Dave is just too quick. Today his grip gives instantly. You watch as his sword sails off over the practice mat. The only warning you get is the soft _pap pap_ of hurried feet and a breath of wind before Dave hits you, hard and low, knocking your feet out from under you. You go down with a stifled shout, your sickles and his shades skittering off across the floor. You half expect the rest of your clothes to go too, seeing as this fight is turning into the stuff of B-movie comedy hijinks.

“What the bulgeknotting _fuck—_ Dave!” He wriggles like a slitherbeast, body hot and spine-meltingly nubile against yours. You pin him down just like you’d pinned him to your pile a week ago. He blinks, and if you thought seeing his eyes would help explain what the shitfuck is going on, you’re disappointed. They are crimson holes in his face, unseeing. Or seeing something that isn’t there.

You shake him, because you are starting to seriously freak out. He’s acting like a robot with a part missing. “Dave, what the fuck, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

His eyes snap back to awareness. You stay that way, breathing in each other’s faces, mingling the mutant heat of your bodies. Doesn’t matter what quadrant you put him in--you still want to devour him from one end to the other.

You don’t know who kisses who this time, only that suddenly you are a mass of writhing limbs and clutching hands, wet mouths and low snarls, Dave’s fingers twisting into your hair until your scalp stings.

You kiss his throat, gasping, too desperate to be careful of your teeth. You can practically feel the marks painting his skin. Stupid humans and their stupid delicate bodies. What is it like knowing you break so easily?

You force yourself to still, to return to his mouth and kiss him slow and soft. He is being so weird right now that it’s up to you to make sure he doesn’t get hurt. You’re not sure you want that job.               

_Like…what if I stopped?_

You sit up and bend your knees, drawing yourself into a curl. Partly to cover your truly mythic wriggly, and partly to keep your insides where they belong. You feel sick. Dave’s eyes open and he gazes over to where his shades have landed, out of reach of both of you. He covers his face with his arms.       

“You can’t keep doing this, bro.” 

“Me!” you squawk. “I’m not doing anything! I’m an innocent bystander! You’re the one who goes around all moody and antagonizing, and then comes and face-plants into my pile looking all pitiable and conciliatory. You’re giving me quadrant whiplash!”

“I don’t give a fuck about your fucking quadrants--.”

“I know that! You’ve only told me everyday since I’ve known you. But you go around smelling like—.” You swallow that back down, because you’re not going to tell Dave how receptive your body has become to his pheromones. “Whatever. I’m not going to sit here and help you punish yourself.” You already have a full schedule of punishing _yourself_ , all appointments fully booked. “I don’t know what’s going on with you. Or, I do, sort of. Some kind of human gay sex crisis, whatever the fuck that is—.”

Dave flash-steps. Or flash-lunges. One second he is on the ground, and the next he’s right in your face, blotchy pink flush floating beneath milk-pale skin.              

“What the fuck,” he hisses. “Who the fuck have you been talking to?”              

“Lalonde, who else?” You feel a momentary squirm of guilt at throwing her under the scuttlebuggy, but she is the one who insists on shoving her pointy human nose into everyone else’s shit. “But it’s not like I can’t tell there’s something going on with you.”            

His mouth snaps shut. You can’t stop looking at his eyes. He pulls his knees up to his chin and wraps his arms around them, mirroring your posture. Lalonde had once told you that if someone starts copying your motions it means that you’ve got them in your clutches and they’re primed for manipulation. That girl freaks you out.               

“Rose doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about,” Dave lies.             

“I know that,” you lie back.

 

**Tip 7: Actually Talk About Your Problems. For Real This Time Instead of Ironically As A Funny Joke**

 

Dave doesn’t try to kiss you again or slam you against any walls. He’s still a constant presence, a babbling ghost as pale as a rainbow drinker haunting the halls of the meteor and occasionally rapping to himself. Or maybe just talking. Like hell you’re going to go beg for his attention. 

You’re in your block, half-watching a movie on your husktop, half brooding about your shitty place in the universe, when trollian chimes, the little icon hopping in the corner and forcing the video player to minimize. It has been weeks since you've used messenger at all. Everyone you know is either dead, unreachable, or lives with you. 

Your surprise and curiosity grows when you see who’s trolling you.

TG: ‘sup 

You pause the movie and tug your husktop into your lap, tentatively alighting your claws on the keys.

CG: DAVE?

TG: naw man its other dave

TG: the dave of christmas future

TG: showin up perigrees early like a big cape-wearing santa to impart gifts and knowledge and to teach you and dave prime all about that human emotion of friendship and how to feel all your feelings

CG: OKAY THAT WOULD BE FUNNY, EXCEPT YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO THAT AND PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE.

CG: ACTUALLY IT’S NOT FUNNY AT ALL AND NEVER WOULD BE. IT’S NOT EVEN REALLY A JOKE. GOOD FUCKING JOB.

CG: NOW WHAT DO YOU WANT. I’M BUSY.

TG: bullshit

TG: youre watching ten things i hate about you for the fourteenth time i just walked past and heard it

CG: WELL I GUESS YOU GOT ME THERE MR. DETECTIVE. IF YOU WERE WALKING BY THEN WHY NOT JUST KNOCK ON THE DOOR LIKE AN ACTUAL FUNCTIONING MEMBER OF YOUR SPECIES?

CG: OR IS ACKNOWLEDGING MY EXISTENCE TOO MUCH TROUBLE?

You know you’re being a jerk, but it chafes your bulge that he has spent the last week pretending you don’t exist and is now just messaging you like nothing ever happened.

TG: this is just a lot easier to talk about over chat than in person

TG: if thats okay with your highness troll god majesty

CG: OH.

CG: OKAY. UH.

CG: WHAT IS THIS EXACTLY?

TG: this is nothing

TG: or at least nothing that fits into a quadrant

TG: or maybe it does i dont know but thats not why im doing it

TG: im not pale flirting with you or whatever else bullshit category you guys shove every single one of your interactions into

TG: i just want to talk

TG: or i guess i want to like leave a huge wall of red text on your screen that you can read if you feel like it

He pauses like he’s waiting for a response, but you just let the cursor flash. After a couple seconds he starts typing again.

TG: look I know ive been a douche of monolithic proportions over the last couple weeks

TG: okay maybe way longer than that

TG: but to be fair i kind of learned from the douche master i.e. my bro/lusus/dude who threw me off my hivestem one time

TG: ironically

TG: anyway i know i shouldnt talk about that or your cuddly troll hindbrain will be unable to resist giving me snuggle paps

TG: or maybe

TG: you know

TG: try to kiss me again

TG: which i would actually be okay with

TG: the kissing not the face petting

TG: i still think thats weird

You frown. If all Dave wants to do is make out again, there’s no need for all this babbling. As righteously angry as you are, you are _also_ eight. Your nook has the final say in most of the decisions you’ll be making over the next few sweeps.

TG: but i think i should try to explain a couple of things before we get down to pile humping

TG: if thats actually a thing you want to all be doing or whatever

TG: because it kind of occurred to me that all of this human stuff im freaking out about probably makes about as much sense to you as all of your guys weird blood rank bullshit makes to me

You snort. Occurred to him. Right. More likely it was whispered in his ear by some snarky broad.

CG: I’M GOING TO LET ‘BLOOD RANK BULLSHIT’ SLIDE IN THE INTEREST OF KEEPING THINGS CIVIL.

TG: see this is the exact shit im talking about

TG: were from totally different cultures dude

TG: none of that makes any sense to me

TG: big fuckin goose egg zero

TG: i mean on earth we have our own bullshit prejudices to deal with

TG: like racism and stuff like that

TG: but i am so totally outside this hemospectrum stuff that its just complete nonsense to me

TG: like i know youre a mutant right

TG: which means you grew up alone because you were afraid of being judged and killed

TG: and then later you hid it from your friends because you thought they wouldnt like you anymore if they knew

Your first instinct is to say you’re pretty sure they didn’t like you that much regardless, but seeing your life spelled out completely dispassionately, like a movie title, leaves you with an unpleasant hollowness in your chest.

TG: see to me thats just totally absurd

TG: not wanting to be someones friend because of the color they bleed

TG: but for you its this whole huge deal

TG: and for me kind of really wanting to mac on a dude is also a huge deal

TG: while you being into me is not a big deal for you

CG: IT’S WEIRD FOR ME TOO, DAVE. BELIEVE ME.

CG: JUST FYI.

TG: right its weird but not in a ‘this is weird because one dude likes another dude’ way

TG: just in a ‘wow making out with dave damn that's strange cause usually I just want him to choke on my bulge and not in a sexy way’

CG: IT WAS KIND OF IN A SEXY WAY

TG: yeah i figured

TG: anyway

TG: what im trying to say is that it might not be a thing for you but its a thing for me

CG: OK.

TG: ok what does ok mean

CG: IT MEANS EXACTLY WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. OK. I GET IT. I HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE ALIEN FUCKERY BUT YOU HAVE MALE FUCKERY ON TOP OF THAT. IT’S TOO WEIRD FOR YOU. YOU DON’T WANT TO DO IT AGAIN.

You’re laying it on a little thick, but you’ve got this _pain_ above your gastric sack, and every time your pump biscuit twitches it smacks it like a blue blood on a rampage. You can’t believe this; you’re actually blinking back filmy red tears because some idiot can’t get over his hang-ups long enough to roll around in a pile with you.

TG: hold up thats not what im saying

TG: yeah its hella weird but that doesnt mean i dont want to do it

CG: REALLY?

TG: yeah dude if weirdness was a deterrent i would have fallen on my sword years ago

TG: things started weird and got weirder and now weve gone so far past weird that weird is just a pimple on the ass of something much bigger and weirder

TG: so yeah i dont want to stop.

TG: im just warning you that i might like

TG: i dont know

TG: flip the fuck off the handle a couple times

TG: or maybe say some stuff i dont mean

TG: or wont mean after i actually think about it a little

TG: so i guess im just warning you or whatever

What’s he’s doing is asking you to give him free reign to be a heinous jerkoff whenever he feels like it. But you behave like that all the time, free reign or no.

CG: FINE. BUT I RESERVE THE RIGHT AND PRIVILEGE TO TOSS YOU OUT OF MY BLOCK BY THE SEAT OF YOUR FILTHY FUCKING GOD PAJAMAS IF YOU PISS ME OFF.

TG: done

TG: should i like

TG: come over

**Tip 8: Don’t Panic**

 

Over the next few weeks, the makeouts get steadily better. Your quadrant confusion gets worse.

Dave is fine with kissing you. More than fine. He spends slow, intent hours memorizing your mouth, tracing the points of your fangs with his tongue. He learns just the right amount of pressure he can exert before he cuts himself. He gets his own pathetic teeth into your neck, which usually goes from _omg sexy_ to _wtf are you doing you flat-fanged fuck stop drooling on me_ before he manages to leave a mark. 

Dave slides between saying nothing and saying everything, and sometimes he says everything without actually saying anything at all. 

“Dude, your skin tastes all peppery and shit. Like, I might just be saying that because you’re grey and pepper is also kind of grey. Except when it’s in those little black balls. But that’s not it, I don’t think. And it’s all hells of smooth, like a dolphin. Or how I bet a dolphin feels. I’ve never felt a dolphin, there aren’t many dolphins in Texas. It’s too conservative.”              

“If you compose ancient slam poetry to my skin I’ll claw your face off,” you promise, but it’s flattering how he can’t stop touching you. 

You stay above the waist, which is bad for your wriggly but great for your sanity. You aren’t sure you are ready to plumb the mysteries of whatever eldritch horror forms the hard line inside Dave’s pajama bottoms.

-

“You guys sure take your feelings-jams seriously.”

Dave’s chin is propped up on his fist, voice slightly compressed as he lies thorax-down. You just grunt, because _duh._ You are lying on the platform in Dave’s block, which is where you do most of your talking. You’ve mostly gotten used to it, but you still have no idea how humans can manage to keep their concupiscent and conciliatory wires from getting crossed. 

Dave’s respiteblock is always too bright, because he’s human and diurnal and also has to compensate for those gloriously douchey shades. Even now that you’re bros, maybe even matesprits, he still only takes them off when you’re fooling around, and sometimes not even then. They are the first thing you go for whenever you guys fight ( _grab-assing_ , Vriska calls it) and you can always count on him to protect his face and leave other, softer targets vulnerable to attack.                               

You’re winded from another one of your hours-long conversations, which always inevitably dissolve into arguments. Dave making some offhand comment, you telling him it makes no sense, him insisting that it does, you telling him it’s just bullshit social conditioning, him bringing up one of your own tightly held beliefs and deconstructing it, just to prove that you are every bit as illogical as he is. 

Beyond the creation of a couple passable rom-coms, Earth seems pretty worthless. From what you’ve gathered, a lot of human romantic hang-ups stem from disdain for females. As in, two males aren’t permitted to pair off because one of them will be inevitably regulated to the role of ‘surrogate female’. Which is apparently a bad thing to be. Girls are basically the rustbloods of human society. For a long, long time they weren’t even allowed to own shit or live in their own hives, and they got forced into quadrants with people they didn’t even know.

“But wait.” You punch one of the squishy slumber loaves Dave has strewn across his platform. “Females are the only acceptable concupiscent partners, right? Then why does everyone seem to hate them so much?”              

Dave shrugs. “I didn’t say it made sense. I guess it’s a control thing.” 

You make a soft noise of assent. That follows. Seadwellers and caste-snobs like Equius have nothing but disdain for the lower half of the hemospectrum, but no highbloods would ever want lowbloods _gone._ Well, maybe maniacs like Eridan. But even he would probably have gotten bored if there was no one left to subjugate.

“Maybe human society would have been better if males hadn’t been put in charge,” you point out.           

Dave laughs. “You sound like Rose. Blame the patriarchy.”             

You’ve heard the humans toss that word around, but you’re still not exactly sure who the Patriarchy are beyond some shadowy human organization. They do sound pretty shitty. And if they are the reason that Dave won’t put his hands anywhere near your mating parts, then they are evil incarnate and they must be stopped.

Dave has rolled onto his back, staring up at the blank ceiling. Before this you had designed a whole new section of Can Town, the two of you and the Mayor sketching out city limits and a warehouse district. Terezi even came and helped out for an hour or two, if you can call sniggering and licking all the building materials ‘helping out’. 

Without thinking, you reach over and pluck Dave’s shades off, snatching your hands back fast before he can grab at you, but today he doesn’t try. He blinks, eyes burning red and melting hot. You stretch out next to him and he sifts fingers through your hair, his thumb resting on the velvety strip of skin around your horn. You shudder and chirp softly. He laughs soundlessly, chest vibrating against yours. He calls your mating calls ‘demon bird noises’. You tell him that at least you don’t sound like a blubber-beast surfacing from the ocean when you’re turned on.

You close your eyes and cup his cheek. You have memorized the texture of his skin and the soft, downy fluff that is the human excuse for hair. His smell is still alien—iron-tinged and sharp, spiking sour with fear or anger. Nothing about being with Dave is like being with a troll. 

Not that you know from experience.

But you do know how your first flushed time is supposed to go, okay? You’ve read it a bunch of times. The heroes always get together after some harrowing experience that makes them realize how much they need each other, how much they pity one another. Passion is brought on by adventure, not monotony. You are supposed to crash together, not slump over slowly in a shitparade of bickering and false starts, some days barely speaking to each other. You are supposed to go on adventures, not have vicious fights over what movie to watch. When you finally do go further, it’s supposed to be romantic, there is supposed to be _lead-up._ It definitely isn’t supposed to be Dave just reaching down and popping the button on your jeans, breathing hot and uncomfortable against your ear.

“So, uh…how about it?”

 

**Tip 9: Always Carry a Towel**

 

“ _That,”_ you say, when the two of you are fully undressed and sort of hunching at either end of the concupiscent platform, “Is definitely not going to fit.”               

Dave’s cheeks dimple and his eyebrows lift.        

You flush and point a claw-tip at his bulge. It isn’t as terrifying as your nightmares, but it’s still freaky. Rigid and rounded at the tip, only a few shades darker than the rest of his skin, and alarmingly _dry._ Human nooks must be cavernous.              

“It’s huge,” you say.

To your irritation, instead of looking properly contrite for his astounding failure in the pants department, Dave smirks.

“Sorry my mammal monstercock is a little too much for you, dude. I get that a lot.” His grin fades and he goes right back to chewing on his lip. “How about we take turns?”               

“What?” It’s rude to keep staring, but his bulge is just so. Fucking. Weird-looking.               

“Like, I do you, then you, uh—.” His cheeks surge a sudden rosy pink. “Then you do me.” He makes a gyrating, ambiguously dirty motion with one of his hands, moving it up and down like he’s brandishing an invisible sodium-mineral shaker. You cringe.             

“You are not doing that to me. You are not yanking on my bulge like I’m a hoofbeast and it’s a bridle.”             

“Then show me how.”

You take his hand and explain the different parts to him. Your face burns but you tell yourself that this is just schoolfeeding. Just teaching an ignorant wriggler stuff he should have learned when he was five sweeps. Dave lets out a little yip of surprise as your bulge senses the warmth of his skin and wraps around his fingers.             

“Shit. It’s friendly.”             

You snort. “And yours just lies there like a dead nibble vermin.”             

“Gross, dude. Gross. Less comparing my dick to rats and more showering it with its deserving adoration.” Dave puts a hand up like he wants to adjust his shades, but they aren’t there and he just paws awkwardly at his face. You snicker. His cool disinterest has evaporated, replaced with nervous curiosity. 

“So it’s…red?”

You growl. “Of course it’s red. We’ve talked enough about my fucking blood color. What were you expecting, all weird pink like yours?”             

Dave shrugs. “Or, you know, grey. Like your skin.”              

You shudder. “That’s messed up.”               

“Do all trolls have junk the color of their blood? Like, Kanaya’s is green and Vriska’s is that fancy fucking sort of blue that isn’t actually blue?” 

“God, I hope they are. I don’t go around thinking about my friends’ bulges.” Okay, that’s a lie, but you don’t go around thinking about Vriska’s and Kanaya’s bulges. At least, you haven’t for awhile. 

“Suddenly all of Terezi’s babbling about wanting to taste my delicious cherry red is a lot dirtier, and also makes a lot more sense. Though I’m pretty sure she would taste my actual blood if I let her.”

You let that one go by unremarked upon. You and Dave have settled an unspoken truce when it comes to Terezi.              

Dave’s hands move further down and his expressions flickers. “This is…” His fingers brush along the hot, slick seam of your nook. You can’t suppress the vibration in your breaths, the twitching muscles in your thighs. Your body thinks you are about to get laid. Stupid body.              

“That’s my nook.”            

Dave blanches. It looks _so_ weird on a human, like his face has been completely drained of color. Jade and John didn’t look like this—why did you get stuck with the two shiniest humans in paradox space? 

You very much expect for him to run after that. He doesn’t. He does you first. 

And ‘doing you’ apparently amounts to pressing two blunt-clawed fingers into your nook and destroying you from the inside out.           

“Jegus beetle-shitting FUCK!” You’re wheezing because seriously, you had not been prepared.               

Dave’s eyes flick to your face but he doesn’t break rhythm, just continues to demolish you with constant motion and delicious pressure, getting just deep enough to brush your seedflap. You wish he had a _normal,_ functional bulge, because you’re really not sure if this is going to be enough to….

uhhhhnoope...you’re wrong, you are so wrong, holy festering shitballs—it’s easy, you’re easy. You are eight sweeps old and hornier than a subjuggulator in a lowblood brothel and Dave Strider is looking at you like you’re on the fucking menu, and goddamn why is this so hot? 

“Dave, aahh… _ahhnnnnn_ —.” His fingers twist and your voice cracks into a rattly chirp. He’s got you _chirping_ for him and he’s too alien to even know what that means.               

His mouth curls up. “My mammal monsterfingers doing it for you?”               

You show him your fangs. “Of course they’re…nnn….doing it—doing it for me, you smug fuck! You’re drumming them against my seedflap, you, _ahhh_ —.” He really _does_ start drumming, an arrhythmic tap tapping against your flap, like the lashing tip of a bulge. You don’t actually know what that feels like, but you’ve read stuff. A lot of stuff. You dig your heels into the platform and arch your back. Your nook makes a really obscene noise that can only be described as a _squelch._               

Dave gigglesnorts. “Dude, you are really wet.”            

You want to kick him. “Oh my god, shut up—.”                                

“Seriously, all porno talk aside. Your alien pussy is drooling all over my fingers.”

You groan and bury your sweaty face in your hands. “It’s not a fucking _pussy—_ what even is that? It’s called a nook, and of fucking course it’s wet, it’s—.” 

“Really fucking hot,” Dave finishes, then colors fantastically and gnaws at his lip. He makes a questioning noise and adds another finger. Then he taps all three of them against your seedflap and a warbling screech wrenches itself from your thorax. You’re shaking and it kind of hurts now with three fingers but you don’t even care, you dig your heels into the platform and force yourself down harder. You want it deeper, faster, more, and _fuck_ do you need a pail.               

“Fuccccck, bucket.”               

Dave’s cheeks are gaunt in the half-light, eyes slightly unfocused. He is biting his lip in concentration, concentration aimed at _you._ “I’ve been called worse--yeah baby I’ll be your fuckbucket--.”              

Your laugh comes out a howl. “I need—I need a fucking _pail_! God, Dave, please—I need—.” 

He sits back and pulls his fingers out, crimson down to his wrist and no, fuck no this isn’t what you wanted. You didn’t want him to stop. Your nook spasms around nothing, excruciatingly empty. “Dave, _please._ ” You hate this, you hate his stupid human face with its little speckles on his cheeks and his blunt human teeth, you hate the dumb thrumming noise in his throat when you kiss him. You can feel yourself wanting to flip black on him, the gathering potent rage mixing with your arousal, one driving on the other. You want to sink in your claws, want to shove your bulge down his throat and make him choke—.              

“I don’t have a bucket.”             

“Wha—.” Understanding words is an issue. Especially human words.              

“I don’t have a bucket, bro. Humans don’t jizz into buckets, we don’t just carry them around—.”               

“God, I fucking _know_ that, OK? I’ve gathered—.” 

He traces a knuckle along the swollen lips of your nook. “You seriously can’t do this without a bucket?”

“If you—gahh—.” Another wave of heat racks you. “If you don’t want to have to burn your—god—burn your fucking concupiscent platform, then—.”               

“Yeah, shit, I got it.” He goes to push his bangs off his sweaty forehead, remembers the material on his fingers and switches hands. “Okay.”

You’re sure you look totally deranged, staring at him all wild-eyed and panting. “OK? What’s okay?”

“ _Hup.”_

He levers you up into his arms, gripping you on the back and the ass, his fingers slipping on the sticky streaks of material between your legs. “Dave, Strider, for the holy love of fuck—.” You let out a thick stream of curses as he lifts you into the air. You clutch tight to his sweaty back, shaky with adrenaline and nerves and aborted release. “How will this help—the fuck are you doing—!”

“Chill. I’m freestyling.”

He flies you into the ablutionblock and then down into the trap. The tile is cold and you hiss. “Wow, yes. Great. This is so much better.” He grins and spreads your legs open, putting your arm back up over your head, posing you exactly how you’d been lying on the platform. 

“What’s a bath,” he says, “If not one giant ass-fuck bucket?”

“That is disgusting,” you grunt. “Also you are disgusting and so is--.”

He kisses you silent, hot mouth and slippery alien tongue, settling on top of you between one blink and another. Fucking show-off. Still hot, though.

You’re sore from all the teasing and waiting, but you swallow your whimper when Dave’s fingers move back into position. You don’t want him to stop. He bites down hard on your lip, and you bite back softly. He makes a crooning mammal noise in his throat and you chirp in response.

“Just a goddamn alien menagerie up in here,” Dave murmurs. He sucks at your throat the way he knows you like, fingers still moving in counterpoint, and god, are all humans this dexterous or is it just all the time spent messing with turntables? The soreness retreats, replaced by a fresh surge of arousal, more material oozing around Dave’s fingers, warmth building inside you. You grip tight to his shoulder and chirp, higher this time. 

Dave drags in a breath. “Are you—was that a good sound—?”

“Yes, Dave, it was a good sound, you’d know if it was a bad sound, you’d get claws through your torso pillar—nnnn _fuck!”_

“Dude, keep your claws out of my torso pillar. I’m god tier, but I’m doing such a heroic fucking job with your pus— _mmff!”_

You kiss him, because listening to him call your nook nonsense words is not conducive to orgasms. His fingers are, and so is that rhythmic _tap tapping_ that he’s started again, and you are probably scratching up his back but he isn’t telling you to stop. You bury your fingers into his hair and lift his chin enough to see his eyes, glowing faintly in the dark block. They widen slightly, then narrow in understanding and amusement. Fine. Fuck it. He can make fun of you later. This is your first flushed time with anyone, and you’re going to look into his eyes, goddamn it. 

The heat and pressure build and you are digging your heels into chilly tile, clenching down so tight on Dave’s fingers that they slow to a stop, like rotors under pressure. You come with a high, chittering trill, and for a few seconds you see nothing but red, feel nothing but the bright wash of pleasure as your insides clench tight and then release.

“Fuuuccck.” You ease back against the floor of the trap, which is really freaking cold in comparison to the hot slickness that now paints your thighs. Dave’s fingers retreat and you shiver with a few twitches of aftershock. Your limbs are rubber and your stomach muscles are sore from clenching so tight. Dave stares at you, taking in the splatter of your material on the trap floor and his own legs. Then he doubles up, shaking. 

“Dave, what’s, are you—.” You reach for him, because, _fuck,_ you hadn’t even considered this, but what if your material is toxic to humans? What if you hurt him, what if you clenched down too hard on his fingers— 

Then you realize he isn’t in pain. The fucker is laughing at you.

“You—.” You’re still catching your breath.

Dave runs his clean hand through his hair--okay, _cleaner._ Neither of them are spotless anymore, and now there is a thin stripe of slurry clinging to his bangs. “Dude, that was a volcanic eruption, holy _shit."_  

You kick him in the ribs. He grabs your foot and tries to tickle the underside, which makes you shriek and writhe and kick harder, skidding in your own cooling material. God, you wish you’d thought to captchalogue a pail. What the hell do humans even do with their material? Human sex must be disgusting.

You find out in the next couple minutes, actually, because Dave leans in to kiss you, hand smoothing up your thighs. Then he wraps his hands around his own bulge and starts to stroke, weird, violent tugs that look like he’s trying to wrench the damn thing off.

“How does that feel good?” you ask, but you reach down anyway.

“Dude, no claws. Shoulder is one thing but the d is not a scratching post—.”

“It’s not my fault humans are festering overripe flesh bags ready to implode at the slightest--.”

Dave lets out a grunting laugh. “Mmm yeah...talk sexy to me, Karkat. Work me with your words, stroke me with your sentiments--.” 

He still does most of the work—you totally do not get this up and down motion—but you add the pressure of your grip. The soft heat of his skin feels so different from a bulge, but his murmured noises of pleasure, the tiny twitches in the muscles of his abdomen, those are the same, and when it hits he tenses all over, gasping against your neck. 

And now you know why humans don’t use buckets. And why Dave had seemed so freaked out by your material. You look at the thin, pearly fluid on your fingers, half-disgusted, half-fascinated. “Smells terrible.”

“It’s jizz, dude.” Dave slumps back against the side of the trap, cheeks flushed, eyes slipping half-closed. “Pretty sure smelling bad is a universal constant.” 

“A brilliant discovery for historators everywhere,” you mumble. 

Dave smiles blurrily. “I should put it in a book. Dave Strider’s jizzfacts. Jizzepedia. A xenological exploration of the nastiest discharge in paradox space.”

“Nothing could be nastier than the discharge rolling out of your mouth.” Though you are lying in a puddle of your own slurry so you don’t have much room to talk. The tiles under you have warmed to your body temperature, but grossness is likely to overcome temperature. And if you don’t move soon you’re going to stick. You can already feel the tacky pull against your lower back as you roll upward and prop yourself next to Dave. He holds your gaze for a few seconds, stunning, sleepy red. He’d left his shades in the respiteblock. 

“So that was...definitely a thing we just did.”  Dave can’t ever let anything lie there for longer than ten seconds without commenting on it. “A kind of...sex thing.”

You snort. It’s so weird to look at Dave and think about how he--your best bro and sort of matesprit, sort of moirail, occasional kismesis--had been the one to cause the hot, satisfied ache in your core, the langor in your arms and legs. How only a couple minutes earlier he’d had you pinned and coming so hard you arched up off the floor, how you would have been willing to say anything, do _anything_ just so he didn’t stop. And now you just feel kind of sore and awkward. Is sex always like this, or is it just the alien thing? Would it be so weird to have done this with someone with a proper bulge?

“Dude.” Knuckles knock hard on the side of your head.

You growl and bare your teeth.“What, shitlord?” You bat his hand out of the way. 

“Looks like you need to take a dump. Relax. Stop thinking so much.” 

“Oh, right. Perfect. Yeah, I’ll get right on that—.”

Seems like kissing is becoming the Strider and Vantas International Signal of Shut the Fuck Up, because suddenly that’s happening, Dave cupping your jaw and sighing into your mouth. The contrary (or contrarier) part of you, the part that sabotaged your relationship with Terezi, wants to protest that none of this is _right_. Even though your real life has been a hundred times more fucknut crazed than the most unlikely trash pile you have ever forced yourself through from one cover to the other. You are not anything near what you are supposed to be; what right do you have to resent Dave for not living up to some bullshit ideal? 

You slump against his shoulder, nose into the clumpy strands of hair textured like waterlogged feathers. He smells content--a thick, settled scent beneath the sharper reek of sweat and genetic material. He yawns hugely and puts an arm around you in a lazy stretch, like you are on a movie date. He moves his fingers through your hair, dragging the soft pads across the base of your horn. You shiver and certain specific regions of you clench down in tired interest. “If that’s the hand you had in my nook I’ll bite it off.” 

Dave draws slow figure-eight patterns, just firm enough not to be ticklish A thrum begins in your shout tunnel, not quite a purr but getting there. 

“No worries, I got this.” You crack on an eye open; he’s fiddling with the faucet on the edge of the trap. “Other benefit of boning in a bathtub beyond a built-in receptacle for your freakish alien boyfriend’s bloody jizz.”

Bathing together is far more of a human romance trope than a troll, but you’ll take it. Of course, the pipes are as shitty as everything else on this meteor, so when he opens the faucet you both get drenched in a rush of freezing cold water.

Dave squeals like an oinkbeast and shoots straight up in the air, leaving you to scramble over the side like a malformed wriggler crawling out of the caves. Icy drops break away from your hair and patter down your back.

“I hate you,” you inform him.

He smirks. “Lies.”

When the water heats up you climb back in, settling against Dave’s side as the trap fills around you. He babbles about temperature and swimming and soap, but honestly you’re starting to feel too good to bother calling him an idiot. The heat soothes the aches in your pelvis and lower back, and your neck stings when you sink lower into the water; maybe he had managed to mark you after all. The thought makes you shiver and chirr softly.

Dave’s mumbles lapse into chuckles.

“What, nooksucker?” 

“If I’d known getting laid would chill your ass out this much I’d have put out months ago.”

You growl and nip at his collarbone. It’s supposed to be a threat, but he rubs your head like you’re a cuddly barkbeast grub.

“Just because I’m the one who knows how to properly appreciate afterglow—.” You cut yourself off. He’s right. You’re chilled out. “Fuck you.”

Dave’s fingertips circle your hornbeds. “Maybe if you’re lucky.”

“That comeback doesn’t work when we’ve just had sex.” 

He sticks his tongue in your ear. 

You shriek and jerk and, predictably, both of you go under. Your limbs get tangled underwater, and you are so close in temperature that it’s hard to tell where he ends and you begin and that is strange, so strange, and when you come up for air you’re pressed against his chest, arms around him. Water sluices off your hair and into your eyes. 

You burn with knowledge of what you’re heading toward—death, destruction, some undoubtedly shitty climax. You’ve been on this rock for a _sweep and a half,_ why has it taken so goddamn long to crash into each other?  Not even considering how many countless fractured timelines where you hate each other platonically, or were indifferent, or never even met at all. Where you died still thinking no one could ever look past the sludge in your veins, where Dave went on believing all the shit his lusus told him.

If you hold him any tighter you’ll crush his thoratic struts, so you you settle against his chest and inhale his scent. This is outrageously pale, and should feel gross after all the sex you just had, but it doesn’t. It just feels nice. If Dave can suppress his freaky ‘sex with females only’ mutation, then you can blur a couple quadrant rules. You brace yourself, but nothing explodes or rumbles or spins around in circles. You should at least get an _ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!_ sound effect. A little cosmological recognition that you’re growing and changing. Or something. 

“I don’t want to ruin the moment or the nipple-nuzzling or whatever it is you’re doing down there—.” 

You dig your claws into his back, a punishment for his lies. Dave Strider has never met a moment he didn’t want to ruin.

“—But the water’s getting kind of cold, and as much as I love all my parts shriveling until they resemble your parts—.” 

“You’re such a wriggler.” He’s right, though. The water has gone lukewarm and cloudy. You hadn’t even noticed. When you peel yourself away from his side, the chill immediately clings to your damp skin and dripping hair. You lunge for a towel. Dave pulls the plug out of the trap with a gurgly slurp, the surface of the water moving in a slow, turgid swirl. Where does it all go? You have no idea how anything on this rock actually works. 

Fuck, what if none of _this_ works? What if things get weird again, what if everyone finds out, what if—. Dave flash-creeps out of the trap, grabbing your hand, fingers navigating through the cracks until they’re twined with yours. “Everything cool?”

 

**Tip 10: Everything is Cool**

 

“Yeah,” you say thickly. Something squirms inside you, aching and helpless and warm. “Yeah, it’s cool.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Human romance sure is weird. 
> 
> Describing gender politics from the POV of a 16-year-old alien, who in turn has had it described to him by a 16-year-old human dude, is a thing i never want to attempt to do again.


End file.
